23 July 2026
At the curtain raiser of the Bharat Renewable Energy Summit & Expo 2026, Shri Ashish Khanna, Director General, International Solar Alliance, reflected on how India’s solar journey has evolved from national ambition into a platform for global energy cooperation.
New Delhi, 23 July 2026: In 2015, India set two important renewable energy journeys in motion. The first RE-INVEST invited global capital and industry to participate in India’s clean energy transition. The same year, India and France launched the International Solar Alliance (ISA), taking that ambition to sun-rich nations across the world.
As Shri Ashish Khanna described it:
“One decision brought the world to India. The other took India to the world.”
A decade later, those two journeys are converging again.
Solar at Scale
The pace of solar growth has changed dramatically. The world took nearly 25 years to install its first 1,000 GW of solar capacity; the next 1,000 GW came in just two years. India reflects the same acceleration; its first 50 GW took around 14 years, while the next 50 GW was added in approximately 14 months.
Solar is no longer simply a climate solution. Against the backdrop of volatile global energy markets, affordable and reliable energy has increasingly become an economic and national security imperative.
With storage and stronger transmission networks, solar can address growing electrification across homes, mobility and industry… from rooftops and EV charging to heat pumps, solar thermal technologies and industrial decarbonisation.
Taking Solar Beyond Borders
The transition, however, remains uneven. Around 660 million people still lack access to electricity, largely in Africa.
As a coalition of 128 countries, ISA is working to bridge this gap through solar agriculture, Agri-PV, mini-grids, rooftops, electric mobility and utility-scale solar parks. Its programmes also support local capacity building, demand aggregation and private investment across Africa, Small Island Developing States and other member countries.
The objective is not simply to export a model, but to build solar ecosystems around local realities and development needs.
Beyond Megawatts
For Shri Khanna, the real impact of solar is ultimately visible in people’s lives.
He recalled meeting a farmer in Uganda whose income had doubled through solar energy; a reminder that renewable energy cannot be measured only through installed capacity.
“The transition is not won in numbers of capacity of solar alone.”
It is also visible in a village receiving reliable electricity, a health centre preserving vaccines, a household reducing its energy bill or a farmer irrigating fields with solar-powered pumps.
Shri Khanna put it simply:
“Nobody takes the Sun away from you.”
A Global Meeting Point
The Bharat Renewable Energy Summit & Expo 2026, to be held from 2–5 November at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi, will bring this larger conversation together.
The Summit will coincide with the Ninth Session of the International Solar Alliance Assembly, the Fourth International Conference on Green Hydrogen, and an energy storage partnership led by the World Bank; bringing renewable generation, storage, grids, hydrogen, manufacturing and finance under one roof.
What began as a platform showcasing India’s renewable energy ambition is therefore evolving into a global meeting point for partnerships, investment and implementation.
A decade ago, India invited the world into its renewable energy journey. Today, that journey is increasingly about building the next chapter together.
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